The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 26 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ravisankar: 90-day bootcamps promising expert status act as a negative signal
“I mean, there are a lot of them who, there are a set of bootcamps who say, you know what, come here, doesn't matter whether you know how to code or not, I'll help you become a great React developer in 90 days. I mean, it's, that's not how it works, right? And …”
Ravisankar: Truly great developers code to build things, not for salaries
“In a very longer term the really great developers are people who did it, not because they'll get a job, but because they really wanted to,
Build something. They really wanted to get this, whatever the idea that they had in mind out.”
Ravisankar: Developers motivated by money hit ceilings sooner than builders
“If you had a monetary value associated with it you might just focus a lot on that and you will reach a ceiling pretty soon. This is just my hypothesis. So versus if you're, if you really
Fall in love with the idea of building or creating new things. The ceili…”
Ravisankar: Top '10x' developers are distinguished by strong business acumen
“The other thing that I'm starting to see happen across a lot of different companies, and even Hackerank has incorporated this, is the business acumen the level of business acumen that you have as a developer. Usually it is, it's always developers or builders. …”
Ravisankar: Startups should recruit their first ten engineers from untapped talent pools
“The current ways of doing proxy on GPAs and degrees is bad, and you have to figure out your first 10 people almost from that untapped pool. I think it helps a lot in your drive and motivation for the long term. That's just my hypothesis, but I just have one da…”
Ravisankar: Resumes Have a Very Poor Correlation to Developer Skill
“I mean, so resumes are just a very poor correlation to skill.”
Ravisankar: Student debt and visas create startup inertia for master's grads
“You do two years of masters, then you do two to three years of working in different companies to pay back the loan, and there's all of these visa things. And by the time you want to start, you're already, I don't know, close to five, six years invested in this…”
Ravisankar: Most developers will learn to code before driving by 2028
“If you just extrapolate the trend line, I think this will be two and four or three and four developers will learn to code before they drive in the next decade or so.”
Ravisankar: Startups care more about open source portfolios than big companies
“The one thing that the startups or the execs cared about the most, because at least in a startup, you may be, you might have a recruiter or not, but most likely you're doing the recruiting on your own. They care more about your contributions or your open sourc…”
Ravisankar: Startups need stack-specific developers while big firms hire generalists
“And also one of the things that was present in the survey was how you wanted to dive in deeper on the knowledge of that particular stack, at least for a startup because of course you have very low or pretty much no bandwidth to train somebody on the new stack …”
Ravisankar: Work-life balance beats office perks in developer appeal
“And one of the things that we learned was how work-life balance Beats all of the different perks that people offer, whether that's free food or we have a ping-pong tournament every week or things along those lines.”
Ravisankar: Surveyed CS graduates report learning significantly from YouTube
“Even though you had a CS degree, a lot of developers said they actually learned a lot from YouTube over books or sites like HackerRank.”
Ravisankar: Minor Repository Edits Do Not Count as Open-Source Contributions
“If you look at, you're right, if you just forked a repo and made some, made a couple of edits in one file, it really doesn't, you can't claim that you actually done contributed to open source or anything.”
Ravisankar: Engineering Teams Will Move Away From Bay Area Concentration
“I think the future would be an ability for you to build out engineering teams wherever you want, and not just restrict yourself to the Bay Area, and a good common connective tissue that makes sure that things don't break because of bad communication or because…”
Ravisankar: Many companies still use GPAs as hiring proxies
“I still think the proxy of your GPAs and companies exist at a lot of companies.”
Ravisankar: Evaluate candidates on thinking framework, not business conclusions
“The, and here is, I mean, all of these things are the nuances are super important, which is it doesn't matter the questions that the candidate asks, whether that's the right or the wrong thing for the business, you have to judge the quality of thinking. It cou…”
Ravisankar: Founders will never find an employee more passionate than themselves
“You can't expect somebody to be more passionate than you. That that's never going to happen.”
Ravisankar: HackerRank wouldn't exist if US grad schools accepted him
“In hindsight, it's great because I don't think we would have started the company if I had come here.”
Ravisankar: Micro-Nuances in Speech and Follow-Ups Make or Break Demo Day
“When I was doing my demo day pitches, all of these little things mattered because it was just a five minute pitch or no, I think it was a two minute or a five minute pitch for the, in the demo day. And every little thing matters a lot because when you're talki…”
Ravisankar: HackerRank Was First Indian-Based Company in Y Combinator
“Actually we were the first Indian based company to get into Y Combinator.”
Ravisankar: HackerRank has 3.4M developers, over 10% of global total
“We have a developer community that's over I think it's 3.4 million as of as of last week. That's slightly over 10% of the world's developer population who come to HackerRank to solve challenges, to practice their skills and get better.”
Ravisankar: One in four developers learned to code before driving
“One in every four developers learn to code before they learn to drive.”
Ravisankar: Interview Street should have focused on 2-3 companies first
“I think we should have focused on, you know what, we're just going to focus on these two companies, mock interviews, right, versus Any tech company anywhere in the world, and we were scrambling for interviewers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, all over. We shou…”
Ravisankar: Y Combinator initially rejected Interview Street
“We had applied to YCombinator with this idea. Of course, we got turned down.”
Ravisankar: US grad school review pivot led to second YC rejection
“That actually took off a bit, but then after three months or so, the traffic was down to zero. Turns out you can only apply twice a year. So we didn't know what to do for the rest of the year. We actually applied to YC even with this idea. We got turned down.”